The Martial Unity

All those months of preparation had paid off. The many months that he spent scraping up passive patterns in the Root's movements and the two large-scale battles in which he had spent gathering its active patterns had paid off.

The predictive model that he consequently built was functional. Rui could see its attacks coming from a mile away, sometimes literally. The passive cues and tells warned him of every attack, while the previous attacks and the positions and timings allowed him to see even further into the future.

The predictive model he had on the Root was still not quite as powerful as the one that he had on Kane, but it was not too far behind either.

The sheer insight he had on the Root's future movements was quite remarkable, yet it became scary when those same movements became too fast for him to react to with his own reflexes. His own movements were on par with the faster grade-ten Martial Artists, his eyes could barely catch them, and they were almost entirely over before he could react.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Rui somersaulted through the air at hypersonic speeds as he gracefully evaded five root attacks converging on his location. His mind had predicted eight more attacks from ahead, he swiftly prepared the appropriate Forestep movements, waiting for precisely the right moment, before mindlessly executing them with sheer and pure reflex, allowing him to surpass his normal limits when it came to execution speed.

The battle from his perspective had become rather bizarre. One moment he was doing in position, moving in a certain way. The very next moment he was elsewhere entirely, moving in an entirely different way.

It was a jarring experience, and one that he wasn't entirely accustomed to in the middle of combat, but he quickly got used to the sensation of applying it when his life was on the line.

he could maintain Godspeed. He couldn't maintain Forestep continuously since his mind did not operate at that speed, with predictions, he could circumvent

allowed him to spend about half of the time in combat using Forestep continuously. Thus, half the time he was as fast as his normal self, while the other half he moved at speeds close to on par with grade-ten speed-oriented

manner, Rui coped with the onslaught of roots

attack, and

he evaded yet another attack. ('Initiating counter-offense as a

SHING

SLASH

his delight, it seemed that the overpowered

been sure if this would be the case, but the blade managed to inflict remarkably heavy damage on the roots with a single attack. Only grade-ten Martial Squires were capable of such

onto a root, freezing its expansion before swinging at the root

CRACK!

lit up as he destroyed

His current battle prowess was the result of his previous two training phases that gave him the necessary power to singlehandedly

with as much of his Martial

sword techniques and hot air attacks, Mind Palace technique, and the VOID algorithm at the core of it

of factors pushed Rui forward, bit by bit, allowing him to accomplish the impossible with what little he had. Rui felt a profound sense of culmination as he employed power